Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas a Kempis

A Kempis offers a pious-sounding maxim that’s actually bracingly unsentimental: you don’t get purity, you get triage. Written from within late medieval Christian discipline, the line assumes a world where moral compromise isn’t a rare lapse but a standing condition of life in community. The intent isn’t to license wrongdoing; it’s to prevent a more dangerous fantasy - that refusing to choose keeps your hands clean.

The subtext is about responsibility under constraint. “Must” does a lot of work: it frames the decision as compulsory, not optional, and shifts the moral burden from intention to outcome. In a devotional culture that prized interior rectitude, that’s a pragmatic corrective. A Kempis is warning the scrupulous conscience against paralysis and the performative conscience against self-exoneration. If you can’t avoid harm, you’re still accountable for the amount of harm you permit.

Context matters because a Kempis isn’t a statesman rationalizing war; he’s associated with the Devotio Moderna and The Imitation of Christ, movements aimed at stripping away spiritual vanity. Read that way, “least evil” becomes a discipline of humility: accept that you are operating inside fallen systems - bodily desires, social obligations, institutional pressures - and measure yourself not by lofty declarations but by the concrete damage you prevent.

It works because it punctures moral grandstanding. The line is short, almost legalistic, and that austerity is the point: when ethics gets real, it stops sounding like a sermon and starts sounding like a choice you’d rather not make.